Carrot is not the easiest seed to start your journey into the joys saving your own seed so you might want to start with something easy like peas or beans if you haven’t tried seed saving before. It is, however, very rewarding particularly when eating your own home grown, second generation carrots.
Carrots (Daucus Carota var Sativa) are umbellifers, (a group of plants that include fennel and parsley among others) that is to say they bear the flowers and seed on umbels, a series of small stalks clustered on the end of a longer stalk, with a series of the longer stalks making up the umbel (note: this is a lot easier to see than it is to describe!). Carrots are also biennials, they store up nutrients in their swollen root the first year and then put up a series of seed heads the following year. If you plant your carrots before the winter solstice some carrots may run up to seed in their first growing year once the days start to lengthen and in tropical areas the carrots may flower at the end of their first growing season.
Carrot flowers are insect pollinated and crossing between varieties can occur although in practice it is unlikely that you will have different carrot varieties flowering at the same time. The weed called wild carrot (Daucus Carota), also referred to as Queen Ann’s Lace, will cause genetic contamination of the seed and result in reduced yields when your saved seed is sown if they grow nearby and flower at the same time as your target carrot. As with any seed saving enterprise, only save the seed from your best carrots and not from any that flowered early.
To harvest the seed allow the carrots to flower and the seed to form, but then keep a close eye on your carrot seeds as they can dry out quickly and start to fall off before you can harvest them. You may wish to harvest the umbels before all the seed has gone brown by cutting the main stalk and storing them in a cool but dry well protected area. So when the seed has turned fully brown rub the umbels between your fingers and the seeds will fall off. There will also be bits of umbel, stalk and other trash in with the seed so if you want to clean your seed pour it from one container to another while gently blowing through the seed to dislodge the trash.
Carrot seed stored in a cool dry area will remain viable up to three years.
